Apps and the PDC

There has been quite a bit of activity surrounding the PDC event that ended today. I wanted to call out a few applications that were worth trying, which leverage either WPF or Silverlight. Of course, the fact Silverlight 4.0 is right around the corner is great news, but I’m sure there’s a number of other people and blogs have that one covered 🙂

First, a new Facebook SDK was unveiled last week, making it easy to develop .Net applications that interact with the popular website. The SDK has support for both WPF and SL. If you’re not sure which technology to pick, why not both? At least, that’s what we’re going for!

We recently released a WPF application called Fishbowl, which makes use of the SDK and provides a great client experience. You can get the application here and read more about it here. There unfortunately isn’t a Silverlight version available, but that may very well change!

One of the reasons I’ve been working with WPF for so long is because I believe it’s one of the few platforms that enables truly compelling user experiences. One such application is called Pivot, from the MS Live Labs team. The chrome of the application was done in WPF, and the application leverages DirectX as well. Although the app is currently only available by invitation, I still recommend checking its website if you want to learn more. For the time being, here’s a video that demonstrates some of the things you can do: